Promote Chinese Language Fluency in the United States

After 9-11, the United States identified several foreign languages critical to the safety and well-being of our government and citizens. Those languages included Mandarin. The US began funding programs teaching Chinese in the hopes of expanding the number of citizens who are able to fluently converse and read/write in Chinese and thereby improving our nations ability to conduct business with China and Taiwan. To that end, many schools received funding from the government to teach Chinese.

Learning Chinese for the sake of using Chinese in the classroom, however, cannot be the end goal. Students need opportunities outside the classroom to use Chinese in order to encourage retention and fluency. This is a particularly difficult task because many parents have not had the benefit of Chinese classes and so children who study at school have virtually no opportunities to practice their Chinese language skills outside the school setting.

One of the easiest ways to encourage children to practice their foreign language skills is to provide movies for them to watch in the foreign language. Recently, Netflix has begun supporting Chinese in both its user interface and customer support systems. It has further begun providing some movies in Chinese (audio and/or subtitles). This petition is to ask Netflix to invest in more children's shows that provide both the Mandarin audio and subtitles (simplified and traditional) in order to support the United States in its goal of becoming more fluent in Chinese.

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Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr.: Promote Chinese language fluency in the United States